(no subject)

[timelets]

Over the last 60 years, Asia absorbed an enormous amount of technology transfer from the US. Moreover, they are now capable of technology development themselves. By contrast, Germany does very little technology transfer to the rest of the world. Their education system is geared toward internal absorption, rather than export.

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery

― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. 1992.